Album of the day – Phil Ochs – A Toast To Those Who Are Gone

Posted on by Opher

I’m having a little Phil Ochs phase this week. Doing an interview with RNR magazine about my Phil Ochs book has sparked me off.

Yesterday I played All The News That’s Fit To Sing – his debut album – today I’ve moved on to A Toast To Those Who Are Gone. That seems appropriate. I propose a toast to the great Phil Ochs.

A Toast To Those Who Are Gone is an album of demos recorded between the end of his Elektra contract and the new A&M one. Although they are demos they sound good to me. They are very much in the same mold as his other Elektra recordings – civil rights takes centre stage but workers’ rights and unions also feature.

I’ll Be There is a favourite of mine.

All songs by Phil Ochs.

  1. “Do What I Have to Do” – 2:36
  2. “The Ballad of Billie Sol” – 2:24
  3. “Colored Town” – 3:00
  4. “A.M.A. Song” – 2:17
  5. “William Moore” – 3:07
  6. “Paul Crump” – 3:34
  7. “Going Down To Mississippi” – 3:04
  8. “I’ll Be There” – 2:10
  9. “Ballad of Oxford (Jimmy Meredith)”  – 2:51
  10. “No Christmas in Kentucky” – 3:04
  11. “A Toast to Those Who Are Gone” – 3:31
  12. “I’m Tired” – 2:20
  13. “City Boy” – 1:58
  14. “Song of My Returning” – 5:17
  15. “The Trial” – 2:44

I was in a trade union all my life!

Posted on by Opher

Without trade unions we would still be on seventy-hour weeks without holidays! All the rights we have had to be fought for. Profit always comes before people. Greed rules!

Things have become simply wrong!

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This country seems to have lost all its common sense and short-term memory. It’s as if the tabloid press has everyone in thrall. It’s not a pleasant place.

The Tories are making hay out of union bashing now and some people are swayed by this! Unbelievable.

The current wave of strikes are due to twelve years of deliberate government pay cuts, service cuts and imposed austerity.

They are now refusing to talk to the unions because their union bashing is making them more popular. Isn’t that obvious?

Without the unions we’d be living in extreme poverty, six-day weeks, no holidays, no maternity leave, no health and safety, no rights. Just look at those jobs which are not unionised.

Meanwhile, the rich get richer and richer. The tax dodging continues. The exploitation and corruption gets worse.

A Day in the life of Joe Conservative

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All the rights we now enjoy had to be fought for against greedy capitalist conservatives who only care about wealth and power.